PCI Card

I recently built my husband a new tower, a brand new mobo (even though its an older model), new CPU, new PSU and of course new DDR2 ram.

His mobo only had one ide connection to it (it has a couple of sata connections).

He has an ide harddrive and two ide rom drives. So I installed the harddrive and one rom to the ide connection on the mobo

However because I wanted to build it as cheaply as possible, I opted for a ULTRA ATA IDE PCI CONTROLLER CARD FOR PC,RAID, which gave me two extra IDE connections (master & slave).

Which I thought would do so I could then install his second rom drive.

I installed the PCI card and drivers, that went well, I then hooked up the second rom drive, and thats when the trouble began.

On bootup, it was searching for IDE connections .....!ERROR No Firmware blah blah blah. However it would boot into Windows 2000 Pro.

Now before you ask did I all the master and slaves set up on the devices correctly, the answer is yes.

So I swapped over the scuzzie cables, this time all the BIOS could find was the two rom drives.

So I swapped them back, same error message searching for IDE connections .....!ERROR No Firmware blah blah blah.

However this time when it would get to the winblows (I am almost ready to start for you), I got the dreaded BSOD.

Thought to myself oh bugga, time for a reinstall of the OS, so I reinstalled Windows 2000 Pro (the PCI card was still installed at this time). The reinstall went without a hitch, up until it came time to reboot the OS, on bootup it would say no ide 0 connected, no ide 1 connected, no ide 2 connected, no ide 3 connected, no ide 4 connected.

However in the BIOS it was reading the hardrive and rom, and would eventually boot up into windows.

But me being the fussy lizard I am, wasn't happy with no ide 0 connected etc. message. So out came the PCI card, and yet another reinstall. However this time the clean install was missing a heap of files (defragmenter, disk cleanup, windows explorer).

So yet another clean reinstall was done, this time not only were the above missing in the taskbar, there was no Desktop Icon, IE Icon or OE Icon.

Yes the saga goes on, I did a repair this time, Desktop Icon, IE Icon and OE Icon were all there YAY!!!!

BUT, the only thing that didnt come back was Windows Explorer off the start key.

I am a control freak when it comes to using a PC, I am aware that if I right click on My Computer and open Explore, it will open like Windows Explorer.
Lookout the lizzard in me is going to spring its head. I WANT BACK MY WINDOWS EXPLORER!!! FROM MY START KEY!!!

I have tried everything except yet another repair or reinstall, which at the moment I am just not prepared to do.

Sooooooo does anyone have suggestions as to how I can get my windows explorer from my start key??

You seem to be mixing up some things. With the PC card installed, you have at least two "BIOSes" in your system - the motherboard one and the one in the IDE PCI card. Plus, you may have a SATA RAID BIOS too. The system BIOS and the IDE card BIOS will detect and report their drives separately.

IDE addon cards often have problems with ATAPI (optical drives). I recommend that you connect the IDE hard drive to the PCI card and leave the optical drives to the motherboard IDE controller.

As for your latest problem.. With all the messing around with drives, you may have ended up with a loose or broken IDE cable that corrupts data. A bad hard drive or bad RAM is not impossible either.

You seem to be mixing up some things. With the PC card installed, you have at least two "BIOSes" in your system - the motherboard one and the one in the IDE PCI card. Plus, you may have a SATA RAID BIOS too. The system BIOS and the IDE card BIOS will detect and report their drives separately.

IDE addon cards often have problems with ATAPI (optical drives). I recommend that you connect the IDE hard drive to the PCI card and leave the optical drives to the motherboard IDE controller.

As for your latest problem.. With all the messing around with drives, you may have ended up with a loose or broken IDE cable that corrupts data. A bad hard drive or bad RAM is not impossible either.

Click to expand...

No I ended up replacing all the IDE cables with new ones.... The reinstall of the OS seem to fix the problem..... I have since returned the PCI Card to place of purchase, I think it was faulty